1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method, and particularly, to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method for controlling a usage amount of recording material.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an image processing apparatus equipped with a print function, there are increasing occasions for printing data produced by a personal computer or the like. At printing, the image processing apparatus uses recording material such as toner or ink to form an image using a method such as an inkjet recording method or an electrophotographic method. The consumption amount of the recording material such as the toner or the ink for this image formation has a great impact on running costs of the image processing apparatus. Therefore there is known an image processing apparatus equipped with a recording material save mode function with the aim of reducing the consumption amount of the recording material, which is called, for example, an ink save mode or a toner save mode.
As a general method for realizing such a reduction function in this recording material, there is considered, for example, a method in which, in a case where a recording material save mode is selected, a reduction processing is executed on an entire image to execute a thinning processing of dots, thus reducing a consumption amount of the recording material. In addition, there is also a method in which, in a case where the recording material saving mode is selected at printing, a density control processing, different from that of a regular print mode, is executed in the density control processing to reduce an output density, thus reducing a consumption amount of the recording material.
In the realization of the recording material save mode in the conventional method described above, the consumption amount of the recording material is decreased over the entire image. Therefore there are some cases where the density of the entire image drops as compared with the image printed by a regular print mode, resulting in degradation in print quality.
Therefore, there is proposed a method in which the consumption amount of the recording material is reduced and also the image quality is less degraded. For example, it is proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-117952 to perform a printing with a quality close to that in the regular mode, by producing in advance a color conversion parameter, where a total applied amount of recording material is suppressed. There is also a method for realizing the recording material save mode in such a manner as not to degrade a print quality by performing a color gamut compression in a perceived color space (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-68982).
It is known that the reduction amount of the recording material, upon changing the color conversion parameter, differs depending on a kind of an image to be printed, in the recording material save mode with the aim of suppression of the quality degradation of the image described above. In the image processing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-117952, however, a user cannot accurately recognize the extent to which the consumption amount of the print amount is reduced by changing the color conversion parameter. Therefore there is a problem that upon selecting the print mode, the consumption amount of the recording material cannot be reduced properly according to a target reduction amount. In the image processing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-68982, there is estimated and selected a color conversion parameter by which a reduction amount of recording material may be the closest to that desired by a user. Therefore it is required to retain a plurality of color conversion parameters, creating a problem with an increase in cost upon putting this image processing apparatus into practice.